Friday, 13 November 2015

Building pride and fighting prejudice

Glasgow University student Samantha Smart has been with LHSA for the past two weeks as part of her MSc in Information Management and Preservation. The course is one of a handful across the country offering an accredited qualification in archives and records management (with which you can become a professional archivist!) We've handed over the blog to Sam this week so she can share her work with us, which will turn into an assessed component of her degree:

For the last two weeks, I have been working on cataloguing
and repackaging the papers of Waverley Care Trust, an Edinburgh-based
organisation set up in 1989 to provide support to those affected by HIV and
AIDS. Their remit later broadened to include work with individuals diagnosed
with Hepatitis C, while their geographical reach has expanded beyond the
Lothians to cover the whole of Scotland. Regular blog readers might remember the
post from earlier this year introducing Waverley Care and its key services, and
showcasing a selection of collection items.

Besides key administrative records like business plans and
annual reports, the collection includes a great deal of visual and ephemeral
material that adds additional detail to the picture of the charity’s day-to-day
work. Items like flyers and invitations, for example, provide a tangible
connection to events recorded officially elsewhere; they suggest particular
moments or interactions. Posters and postcards demonstrate the outward-facing
work of Waverley Care: raising awareness, contributing to the public
understanding of HIV and developing links to the larger community.

Invitation to ‘Pride &
Prejudice’ exhibition (1999). GD36/4/1/7.

Taken together, all of the records within this collection
document the extraordinary range of services, initiatives and activities
facilitated by staff and volunteers. While working my way through the material,
I found references to tai chi, sculpture, quilting, mask-making, line dancing,
poetry writing, walking, reflexology, papermaking, video editing, singing and
stained glass design (a non-comprehensive list!). Many of these activities were
run as part of the Arts Project, an ambitious programme which began in the
early nineties, administered jointly through the SOLAS Centre and Milestone
House. The Waverley Care collection includes snapshots and samples of some of
the end-products of this project - two printed booklets of participants’ writing,
posters for public exhibitions of artwork, photographs of a completed stained
glass window in situ at Milestone
House - but also goes some way towards recording the equally (or more) valuable
process of creation.

Looking at the changing types of services offered by Waverley
Care over the 1990s and 2000s reveals the organisation’s responsiveness to both
the needs expressed by their users and to developments in HIV treatment and
care. From its establishment, the Information Centre at SOLAS allowed users to
carry out their own research into treatment options, a particularly important
function in the years before widespread internet access. Waverley Care’s annual
review for 1995 notes excitedly that ‘the Information Centre is about to join
the Worldwide Internet’ (capitals original!), while the report for 1997
contains the news that they are ‘looking forward to the installation of a
second Internet terminal’, possibly reflecting increased demand for up-to-date
information about drug treatments in the early years of combination therapy.

Information leaflet for
World Aids Day. GD36/4/1/4.

Having examined and described each of the records within the
Waverley Care Trust collection, I was left with a clear sense of the
organisational ethos and of the ways in which staff, volunteers, service users,
families, carers and others involved with the work of the charity were able to
form a network of mutual support. They tell of imagination and encouragement,
of enthusiasm and vitality. Equally, these records tell only partial stories,
and there will have been many encounters and experiences on which they are
silent - narratives that rely on the memories of those with a personal connection
to the charity and its work. Cataloguing, though, represents a step towards initiating
these potential conversations and towards putting the Waverley Care records
into dialogue with items from LHSA’s related collections, which will in turn
allow further aspects of the collective response to HIV and AIDS in Edinburgh
and the Lothians to be brought to light.

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Lothian Health Services Archive holds the historically important local records of NHS hospitals and other health-related material.
We collect, preserve and catalogue these records and promote them to increase understanding of the history of health and for the benefit of all.

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